Chapter 3 Literary Periods Flashcards
Overview of Literary Periods
Enlightenment-science/logic/discourse, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication on the Rights of Women, Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac
Romanticism- Nature, emotion, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake and John Keats
Victorianism- The novel, Dickens, George Eliot, hardwork, virtue-good people get good outcomes and bad people are punished
Modernism-fractured, frightening situation in the modern world, WW1, cynical, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and also To the Lighthouse, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, W.B. Yeats’ The Second Coming.
Post-Modernism-subjectivity, the idea that nothing is certain and everything depends on perspective, Deconstruction-inherent contradictions within it and all of the structures that we take for granted, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick
Medieval Lit
alliterative verse, no rhyming caesura, pauses in the middle of lines Beowulf elegiac poem- life and wisdom allegorical Chaucer/The Canterbury Tales 400 ad to 1485
Renaissance
printing press/humanism/literature as art Shakespeare Christopher Marlowe-The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus Ben Jonson-Volpone, the Alchemist Edmund Spenser-The Faerie Queene John Donne-metaphysical poetry Philip Sidney-The Defense of Poesy Francis Bacon-Empiricism
Restoration period
Lit named after King Charles II
John Milton-Paradise Lost
John Dryden-Heroic Couplet
John Bunyan-The Pilgrim’s progress
Neoclasicism
Rise of the Novel
Daniel Defoe-Robinson Crusoe
Jonathan Swift- Gulliver’s Travels
Alexander Pope-The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad-mock epics
Samuel Johnson-A Dictionary of the English Language
Licensing Act of 1737-pushed writers to turn to novels rather than drama plays
Romantic Prose
Departure from reason, focus on nature, element of supernatural, focus on the individual
1830-1865
Frankenstein
Sir Walter Scott-Rob Roy, Ivanhoe-identity
Jane Austen-Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Sense and Sensibility-romantic love stories
The Bronte Sisters-Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights-supernatural romantic
Native American and Colonial Lit
Oral Tradition-Native-hero journey, trickster, nature changes, worlds created
Puritan writing-focus on god, hardships of life on colonies, symbolism of everyday events, inward reflection, plain language
politics-separation of church and state, following 10 commandments
Early American Writers
John Smith- described the day-to-day life, opportunity, and geography of the Virginia colony, as well as a questionable account with an Indian woman named Pocahontas.
John Winthrop lay sermon coined the phrase ‘city on a hill’ to describe America and his diary became an important book in the history of Massachusetts. Allow God’s ideal society to flourish in the New World
Roger Williams- books and pamphlets promoted his ideals, including separation from the Church of England, separation of church and state, and the freedom of all citizens to follow their conscience.
American Renaissance
Romanticism Transcendentalism-Emerson, Thoreau Little Women Religion- Second Great Awakening Pop Culture- Art, entertainment
Victorian Lit
Huge pop. growth
improvements in technology
changing world views
poor conditions for the working class
Charles Dickens- Oliver Twist, David Copperfield
George Eliot- woman-strong character development
Lord Alfred Tennyson,
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Matthew Arnold.
Their poems were often characterized by a strong desire to connect with the past, a skepticism about religion, strong sense of humor
Literary Realism
portray life as it was, rejection of Romanticism
1865-1910
divide between rich and poor-literate working classs
Mark Twain,
William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis and Henry James saw this gap in the landscape of literature at the time. So they began to write real stories with real characters who often spoke in a way that reflected their region, class, gender and age. Mark Twain especially is known for the use of dialect
Naturalism
Depict the world in honest straight forward fashion from 1880s to WW2
Social Darwinism
journalistic approach
Major naturalist authors include Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Frank Norris and Edith Wharton.
Among the most significant works in this style are Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and London’s ‘To Build a Fire
Literary Modernism
nonlinearity of plot or sequence of things
irony and satire
voices and the idea of stream of consciousness
allusions-external refernce
Joyce- Ulysses Eliot- The Waste Land Woolf-To the Lighthouse Lawrence- Lady Chatterley's Lover Beckett- Waiting for Godot
reaction to World War I and industrialization
Modernist Literature
a rejection of traditional artistic rules and rise in individual experimentation.
Ezra Pound- Free verse, imagism
Gertrude Stein-Streaming, humorous and pointedly rejecting traditional ideas of literature
Katherine Mansfield- characters lived normal lives, dealt with contemporary issues, and had real human struggles
Post Modern Lit
Postmodern literature is a form of literature which is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on such literary conventions as fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narrators, often unrealistic and downright impossible plots, games, parody, paranoia, dark humor and authorial self-reference.
- Pastiche: The taking of various ideas from previous writings and literary styles and pasting them together to make new styles.
- Intertextuality: The acknowledgment of previous literary works within another literary work.
- Metafiction: The act of writing about writing or making readers aware of the fictional nature of the very fiction they’re reading.
- Temporal Distortion: The use of non-linear timelines and narrative techniques in a story.
- Minimalism: The use of characters and events which are decidedly common and non-exceptional characters.
- Maximalism: Disorganized, lengthy, highly detailed writing.
- Magical Realism: The introduction of impossible or unrealistic events into a narrative that is otherwise realistic.
- Faction: The mixing of actual historical events with fictional events without clearly defining what is factual and what is fictional.
- Reader Involvement: Often through direct address to the reader and the open acknowledgment of the fictional nature of the events being described.
